Java IO.pdf - Nguyen Dang Binh

Appendix A. Additional Resources
Java I/O
When I began work on this book, I thought it would take me about 200 pages and about two
months. Now, more than a year and 500 pages later, I can see that I/O is a far larger, more
important, and more encompassing topic than I originally guessed. Many chapters could
easily lead to books of their own. Indeed, several (Chapter 5, and Chapter 10) already are
other books.
Since I can't possibly say everything there is to say about all these fascinating topics I've
touched on in one page or another in this tome, I'd like to point you to several books, mailing
lists, and web sites that explore some of the issues raised in this book in greater detail. Some
of these are I/O-specific; some are mostly tangential. However, they're all interesting and
worthy of further study and thought.
A.1 Digital Think
Digital Think (http://www.digitalthink.com/) offers web-based training courses for
programmers, developers, system administrators, and end users in C, C++, Java, Windows,
web development, object-oriented programming, and more. This book grew out of two webbased
courses I wrote for Digital Think, Java Streams
(http://www.digitalthink.com/catalog/cs/cs108/) and Java Readers and Writers
(http://www.digitalthink.com/catalog/cs/cs208/). Although this book is far more
comprehensive than those two courses, they're a good way to get started with this material,
especially if you think you need a personal helping hand or a leg up. Each course includes
graded exercises, a hands-on course project, and tutors to answer your questions and assist
you with the difficult parts.
A.2 Design Patterns
At the time I was writing the first draft of this book, I also happened to be learning about
design patterns. Gradually, it became obvious that much of the AWT was written by
programmers who had patterns on the brain. The java.awt.Toolkit class is a textbook
example of the "abstract factory" pattern. The URL class's openConnection() method is a
factory method. The Reader and Writer classes are decorators on top of InputStream and
OutputStream. The engine classes in the JCE are proxies, and I could cite many more
examples. Much of the class library—including the java.io package—has been designed
with design patterns, and it will all make a lot more sense if you're familiar with the standard
patterns.
The seminal text on the subject is Design Patterns, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph
Johnson, and John Vlissides (Addison-Wesley, 1995). The four authors are colloquially
known as the "Gang of Four," and the book is often cited informally as "GoF." The 23
patterns covered in GoF are rapidly becoming part of the vocabulary of the object-oriented
programming community. Design patterns are also beginning to be covered in many more
introductory books about object-oriented programming and Java.
There are also several extremely active mailing lists and web sites devoted to design patterns.
To subscribe to the patterns@cs.uiuc.edu list send email to patterns-request@cs.uiuc.edu with
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